One more resolution for the new year

poison-envy-POSTER-SM

We’re already two weeks into 2015, but I’ve just thought up another New Year’s resolution, so I’m going to make it now.

It’s a simple one, just four words: turn envy into inspiration.

This morning, my writer friend Claire emailed the members of our writing group to announce that she had just launched her new website and blog. In her first blog entry, she wrote about surviving two data-devouring computer crashes, replacing her computer, and—most impressive of all—planning and carrying out a week-long personal writing retreat.

Her partner, Deborah, a nurse, was off to Guatemala to spend the week working in a clinic, so Claire holed up in their rustic, off-the-grid cabin, disconnected herself from the outside world, hauled water from the well and wood for the fire…and set up a website, created a blog, started an application for a writing residency, and added thirty-two pages to her novel-in-progress.

I subscribed to her blog and responded to her email right away to let her know how impressed I was by all she had done, and how inspired I was by her successful home writing retreat.

Except that as I typed my email, “inspired” wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

“I’m so envious of your home writing retreat!” I wrote.

“Envious” seemed like the most natural word to use. After all, my first reaction, when I read about Claire’s full week of solitude, was envy. A whole week at home alone to write? Heck, yes, I was envious.

But I started to think about what that word—envy—really means. To me, at least, it has quite negative connotations. In fact, it reflects badly on both the envier and the envied.

The one who envies is saying, in a way, “Poor me, that’s something that I can’t do/have/gain.”

Even worse, there’s a suggestion, implicit in the word, that the person being envied doesn’t deserve what they’ve done/gotten/gained, or, at the very least, there’s no credit given for the effort they’ve put into the achievement. (It’s kind of like telling a marathon winner, “You’re so lucky.”)

That certainly wasn’t the message I meant to send to Claire, who had an idea for a writing retreat, planned how to make it happen, set definite goals for herself, and then took full advantage of the time to accomplish them.

So I changed my words to, “I’m so inspired by your home writing retreat!”

Because if I say, instead, that I’m inspired by what Claire has done, what I’m saying—what I hope I’m conveying, anyway—is, “Thank you for showing me that it’s possible to set goals and achieve them.”

Merriam-Webster defines envy as “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.”

Being “envious” takes the responsibility off of me and allows me to feel sorry for myself. It takes me back to elementary school, when maybe I was envious that Susie’s father was rich and bought her a pony, while all I got was a goldfish. (Actually, I didn’t know anyone with a pony. Or anyone named Susie, for that matter.)

And it’s true, I wasn’t inspired by Susie’s pony. I was envious. But I was a little kid. And it was a pony. (If there had been a pony, that is.) 

“To inspire,” on the other hand, means “to fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”

“Inspired” says that I’m going to choose to view others’ achievements in a positive way, as an example of what I, too, can achieve, if I focus on a goal and work at it.

As I told Claire, “I realized that if I make that same word substitution every time I start to feel envy about anyone, for any reason, it will automatically turn a negative feeling into a positive. So, from here on out, I will no longer feel envy—always inspiration instead.”

Of course, I haven’t exactly done a great job so far with my other ten resolutions for 2015. I sure am envious of inspired by people who actually manage to keep their resolutions.

inspiration_road1

Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert

introvert_sweaterIn honor of World Introvert Day (and because I don’t have time to write a new post today because I am–gasp!–leaving the house shortly for dinner with about a dozen people [but it’s family, and it’s at my brother’s house, so it’s very manageable for me]) I’m reposting this list of signs that you may be an introvert that I came up with a few years ago on my former blog (harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com).

The Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert

10.  You may be an introvert if you think organizing your stamp collection is a reasonable excuse for not going out for drinks after work.

9.  You may be an introvert if you think Henry Brooks Adams was a genius for knowing that “One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”

8.  You may be an introvert if you’ve ever heard someone use a line like “I’m just not one for crowds” and filed it away in your memory, thinking, that’s one I can use!

7.  You may be an introvert if the statement, “I never feel lonely, except in a crowd” makes perfect sense to you.

6.  You may be an introvert if you secretly (or not so secretly) hate weddings.

5.  You may be an introvert if you can’t believe your good fortune when you get home and find no messages on the answering machine.

4.  You may be an introvert if you’ve ever had to be bribed to attend a party. (When I was about seven, I refused to attend a friend’s birthday party until my mother told me a secret: the prizes for those ridiculous games like musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey were going to be…live dime-store turtles! Obviously, this was before the sale of baby turtles was banned due to concerns about salmonella.)

3.  You may be an introvert if, in high school, when couples were slipping into supply closets to neck, you were slipping into them just to be alone for one goddamned minute!

2.  You may be an introvert if the part of a recent party you enjoyed most was the 30 minutes you spent reading the label on the Listerine bottle in the hostess’ bathroom.

1.  And…the number one sign you may be an introvert: if you’ve ever left a gathering to get something from your car and instead found yourself driving home, leaving your purse, coat, and spouse behind.

So long, 2014

Camp_sunset_12_31_14

The last sunset of 2014, as seen from Sunny Rock.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and while I never go out to celebrate, and only rarely stay awake until midnight, I have generally positive feelings toward the whole “out with the old; in with the new” tradition.

Every December 31st is a chance to look back over the past year, remember all the best things about it, and forget all the worst things. And every January 1st is a chance to start over with a new year, a new calendar, a new opportunity to change the things that aren’t working (and keep doing things that are).

Even though I know perfectly well that most New Year’s resolutions are broken (about 92%, statistically, I believe), and even though I’ve rarely done very well at keeping them myself (or even remembering what they were past mid-January or so), I usually make a few, with great hope and optimism. (Once in a while, one sticks: I’ve been flossing my teeth—daily, without fail— for so long that I don’t even remember which year I made that resolution.)

So, in the spirit of New Year’s Eve, and in no particular order of importance, here are two lists: one of ten good things that happened in 2014, and one of ten things I hope to improve in 2015.

Good stuff about 2014:

  1. Tony and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. When we got married in 1989, after dating for only eight weeks, we knew it would last—but it’s nice to be able to prove it to all the people who were too nice to say they thought we were crazy.
  2. Will graduated from college, the last of our four kids to reach that milestone. He got a part-time job in the library at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village (to go with his other part-time job at the Auburn Public Library). We all got to know the Shakers, and, as it turns out, we kind of love them.
  3. I exercised (at least 30 minutes a day) on every single day of 2014, continuing an unbroken streak I started way back in April of 2012. As a matter of fact, tomorrow will be Day #1000 without a miss.
  4. I wrote 87 stories for the Bethel Citizen. Besides covering various events and meetings, I got to interview local luminaries like musician, sign-painter, and long-time Bethel Water District employee Donnie Katlin; retiring Maine Adult Education Executive Director Cathy Newell; and 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco.
  5. In June, Tony had a very successful surgery on his eye that ended a couple of frustrating years of double vision and trouble reading. Yay!
  6. I read 42 books, about ten less than in 2013, but still a fairly decent number. My 2014 reading included 25 novels, seven short story collections, six memoirs, three poetry collections, and one biography. I also read at least two poems a day from anthologies, because poetry rocks.
  7. And, because poetry rocks, I joined a weekly poetry group at the West Paris Library, led by the remarkable Rodney Abbott, retired Telstar history teacher and all-around great guy, who gives new meaning to the term “active retirement.”
  8. I got my first freelance piece published, and got paid for it! Although the appearance of my essay, “Just Like Glass” in the June issue of Down East Magazine hasn’t led to a flurry of subsequent publications, at least this means I won’t die unpublished as a freelancer.
  9. I got “out” some. Everyone who knows me well knows that I’m a homebody (or, for four months of the year, a campbody), but in 2014 I attended at least three concerts, two plays (one at Deertrees Theatre in Harrison and Elizabeth Peavey’s terrific one-woman show, “My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother,” in Portland), two readings (David Sedaris and Richard Blanco), and the annual Christmas Cantata at the church across the street from my house (which, in 26 Decembers here, I’d never before managed to attend). I go regularly to Greenwood selectmen’s meetings, as well as my wonderful, supportive writing group meetings. I’m not saying it’s a trend, or that I intend to make a regular habit of it, but it turns out that getting out now and then isn’t so bad.
  10. While I didn’t finish either of my two big writing projects, I did add about 25,000 words to one of them this year, which, when considered along with various blog posts, short stories, essays, and the aforementioned 87 newspaper stories, constitutes a fair amount of writing in 2014.

Resolutions for 2015:

  1. A place for everything, and everything in its place—even if that means getting rid of half my possessions. I mean it this time. Really.
  2. Early to bed and early to rise. Take advantage of morning hours, when I know I’m at my best.
  3. More writing! Create—and stick to—a more rigid writing schedule. Take advantage of morning hours…
  4. Submit more pieces for publication, and grow a thicker skin when it comes to rejections.
  5. Continue the exercise streak, which will be three years old on April 7th. Take advantage of morning hours…
  6. Eat better. Maybe even consider baking fewer cookies. Maybe.
  7. Spend more time with my siblings. Because they’re all pretty great. And I haven’t seen one of my brothers in over a year.
  8. More reading! Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. He does not say that about cleaning the house, cooking dinner, or buying groceries. Learn to see reading as valuable work, not a brief reward at the end of the day. Take advantage of morning hours…
  9. Spend less time doing dumb things on line (thus freeing up more time for #3, #5, #7, and #8).
  10. Be nice when possible. (I used to be a lot nicer than I am now, but I’m working on it.)

Christmas Crying Contest

ScreamI’m just going to go ahead and say it: I’m glad Christmas is over.

I am the mother of one adult daughter who is so devoted to the holiday that I suspect she was switched at birth with an elf baby, and another who starts drinking peppermint lattes and watching—and quoting from—Christmas movies by mid-November.

I come across as Scrooge-like by comparison, merely because I refuse to listen to Christmas carols, watch Christmas movies, or bake a single Christmas cookie until at least a day or two after Thanksgiving.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I don’t like Christmas. Although I’m not very religious and I detest the rampant commercialism that is such a big part of the holiday, there are, in fact, many things I actually love about Christmas, like the focus on family and friends, the fact that people—on the whole, at least—seem so much more generous and kind around the holidays, and the smells of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, peppermint, and balsam fir.                                                              Sweet Smell of Christmas

(When my oldest brother’s kids, who are now in their 40s (gulp!), were little, they had this classic scratch-and-sniff Golden book. It was brought out only around Christmas, and I loved reading it to them.)

But the holidays always have a way of leading me to spend too much, eat too much, do too much, miss my mom too much, and get all nostalgic for my childhood, a time when I felt none of the onerous responsibilities of Christmas—and all of the magic.

Because Christmas—even when your kids are grown and you no longer have to count the number of gifts for each under the tree, rush out on Christmas Eve to buy one more stocking stuffer to make those come out even, and remember that Santa (and only Santa) uses the red-and-white-striped paper to wrap his gifts—is a lot of work.

Specifically, at least in the circles I travel in, it’s a lot of work for women. Christmas is so much work for women that it often puts us completely over the edge long before The Actual Day.

Hence, the Christmas Crying Contest.

My best friend Donna, two other high school friends, and I started the contest back when we all had long gift lists, young children to thrill and fulfill, houses to decorate, and slight-to-moderate Martha Stewart complexes. It was the 1990s, and we were, to use a pop psychology term of the day, Women Who Did Too Much.

It started with an exchange of emails asking each other, “Have you cried yet this year?” and sharing stories of our own personal meltdowns, which included, over the years, such Last Straws as husbands who were not properly sympathetic/grateful/impressed with our efforts, kids who had suddenly outgrown the magic, and, once, low-fat baloney.

Eventually, we turned it into a tongue-in-cheek contest that kicked off each year on December first, with the first person to have a holiday meltdown declared that year’s winner. (There were no prizes, other than the sympathy of the other participants, and the knowledge that they would soon follow.)

In recent years, as our kids got older, as we gave up trying to be Martha, and, perhaps most significant of all, as we approached what we now like to call “the f— you fifties,” we began to notice that we were getting through entire holiday seasons without tears. We did, however, all start to notice a new manifestation of holiday stress—instead of crying, we frequently felt like hitting people.

[Note: when teenagers and young adults text “WTH,” it means “what the hell?” When women in their fifties text “WTH,” the translation is “want to hit,” as in, “Jerry lost his wallet again—WTH!” or “Tony has the TV up so loud I can’t think—WTH!”]

This year, when Donna reminded us on December 5th (because we’ve also become forgetful) that the contest was underway, she said, “I suggest we alter the guidelines. Now that we’re menopausal, peri-menopausal, or ‘periwinkle,’ as Jerry would say, share if you hit someone during this holiday season (that’s the true winner), or share the meanest thing you’ve said this month…As I remember, there was a lot more crying about the holidays when we were younger. I guess that was because we were trying to make super special, wonderful, magical holiday memories and now we just don’t give a s**t.”

We had a pretty low-key Christmas here, but I still managed to put up a tree and some outside lights, buy and wrap a few gifts, and bake 1,643 cookies. I haven’t hit anyone this December, and although I thought a lot of mean things, I think I refrained from saying any of them aloud. I shed a few tears, but they were more the sentimental kind of tears than the meltdown kind.

Our friend Lynn easily won the contest this year, by crying in her car in the parking lot of Market Basket before going in to buy supplies for the neighborhood Latke-fest that she and her husband host each year. But personally, I think being married to a Jewish guy and thus having to celebrate not only Christmas, but also Hanukkah, gives her a slight advantage.

Junior high, mean girls, and Campbell’s soup

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I opened a can of Campbell’s vegetable beef soup, and I was transported, abruptly and with remarkable clarity, straight back to junior high. If I’d peeked into a mirror, I would have expected to see a sullen round-faced girl in gold wire-rimmed glasses, with frizzy long hair parted down the middle.

I ate a lot of Campbell’s soup when I was growing up. When I was in elementary school, my mother used to send it to school with me in the winter, packed in a red plaid Thermos with a glass liner that had an unfortunate habit of breaking when you dropped your lunchbox down the stairs, or used it to play shuffleboard on the playground.

Mom and I ate Campbell’s soup for Saturday lunches, a can split between us, a waxed paper sleeve of Ritz crackers to crumble into our bowls. And popcorn and Campbell’s tomato soup was a staple Sunday night supper in our house, since we had our big dinner in the afternoon on Sundays, after church.

But the era I most associate with Campbell’s soup is the two years I spent attending junior high in a strange new school after our move across town when I was eleven years old.

I know my mom wasn’t deliberately trying to ruin my life when she decided to sell our big house on Marshall Street and move to a two-bedroom ranch on West River. A smaller house with a smaller yard made sense, now that the older kids were grown and gone.

Still, I’m sure that another reason for the move was to get me out of the elementary school I’d attended through the sixth grade, where I’d gradually managed to overcome my innate shyness, and had found a comfortable niche as a sort of smart mouth/class clown/eccentric kid.

I loved the attention I was getting, but Mom, who had managed to raise my four siblings without receiving a single dreaded “note home from the teacher,” and who had never before seen words like “disruptive”  and “headstrong” in report card comments, was sure I was headed for a future as a juvenile delinquent.

So we moved, and I left the neighborhood where I knew every family, and the school where I knew every kid and every teacher, and started seventh grade in a school where I knew no one.

Although the schools were only a couple of miles apart, the kids at my new school, for whatever reason, were light-years ahead socially. There were cliques and alliances, romances and break-ups, constant whispered intrigue. It might as well have been another country as far as I was concerned, with its own language and a whole new set of customs.

To make things worse, my mom was the school librarian. Her position made her enough of an authority figure to get kids in trouble for acting up in the library, but not enough of one to command much actual fear or respect.

Some of the kids called me “Mrs. Wight’s Daughter” for the entire two years I was there, not bothering to learn my name, and said clever things like, “Hey, Mrs. Wight’s Daughter, do you read a lot of books?” and “Hey, Mrs. Wight’s Daughter, do you live in the library?”

Also, it turned out that I had really bad fashion sense, something that had somehow gone unnoticed at my old school. My skirts were too long, my pants were too short, I still wore knee socks instead of panty hose. And I had the world’s bulkiest and most ridiculous navy blue fake-fur coat.

The mean girls took to calling me “Fuzzy Bear,” which was not really an improvement over “Mrs. Wight’s Daughter.” I spent most of my time at school trying not to be noticed, no small feat when you’re the only kid in knee socks and navy blue fake fur.

Every day, in order to avoid the possibility—who am I kidding? the probability—of having no one to sit with in the cafeteria or hang out with on the playground, I walked the half-mile home and heated up a can of Campbell’s soup for lunch. I had forty whole minutes of freedom in the middle of every awful day, and I took advantage of every one of them.

It took me nine minutes to walk each way, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, reciting poems I’d memorized, and making up stories in my head. (OK, in fairness to the kids at my new school, it’s possible that I might not have fit in much of anywhere in seventh grade.) That left me twenty-two glorious minutes alone at home. I hated our new house almost as much as I hated my new school, but at least it was quiet and empty in the middle of the day.

I got to use my own bathroom, without the risk of encountering any of the mean girls in the school lavatory. I got to sit at our little round kitchen table, and read a book while I ate. Since my mother wasn’t home to object, I let my cat sit on the table for company. It was the best part of my day.

Although that move across town, coming as it did at exactly the wrong time in my adolescence, dealt a severe blow to my confidence and self-esteem, it’s very possible that those forty-minute daily escapes turned me into the person I became. They led me to embrace solitude, accept my quirks, entertain myself, get lost in books, and count on cats for companionship, all things that are still important to me.

And even though I eventually became a pretty good cook, and learned to make pots and pots of really good homemade soups, sometimes a mug of Campbell’s vegetable beef still really hits the spot.

Carl_on_table

Wake up! This is the day you’ve been waiting for!

We moved home from camp on September 29th, and I’ve spent most of the past three and a half weeks moving objects from one place to another and back again. It seems impossible that I’ll ever make room for the several carloads of belongings that were moved to camp gradually over the course of our four-month stay, but then returned home all at once, dumped unceremoniously onto every flat surface in the house.

When I was growing up we spent the whole summer at camp, just as I do now. Once I was the only kid left at home, my mother traded in our old station wagon, and she and I made the 300-mile move from Connecticut each June in a mid-sized sedan.

We brought a few changes of clothes and some books and magazines, and not much else. It was all we really needed. My mother had “camp clothes” that she left in the closet each fall (a few are still there), and the kitchen had been well stocked, over many years, with dishes and cookware. Anything too worn or chipped or dented to be used at home—the mismatched flatware, the electric frying pan with the leg that collapsed, the hand mixer that overheated three minutes before the seven-minute frosting was done—was “good enough for camp.”

If there’s any disadvantage to living just three miles from camp instead of 300, it’s my tendency to move our entire lives, twice a year, back and forth over that stretch of road. After all, it’s only three miles. It’s close enough to bring all my favorite cooking gear—and this includes not only my fancy cookie scoops, Pampered Chef measuring cups, and best paring knife, but also my food processor, canning kettle, and 25-pound KitchenAid stand mixer.

And that’s just the kitchen stuff. Despite the fact that camp has its own tool closet full of hammers, screwdrivers, and handsaws, and even its own circular saw and electric drill, most of our hand tools and small power tools manage to migrate there over the course of the summer. Then there are the stacks of books we think we’ll finally find time to read, the games we don’t play at home but think we might at camp, and the knitting projects I end up moving home again, unfinished, at the end of the summer.

While moving from home to camp is something I look forward to each spring, moving back home again in the fall is definitely not. Settling back in at home is always an ordeal, despite my annual vow that I’m going to take advantage of the move to figure out what it is we really need and give away, toss out, or pack up everything else.

I start out with the best intentions, and some years I even make a little bit of headway. This year, for instance, I went through my closet and sorted out six big bags of clothes and shoes to donate. It felt like measurable progress, and I vowed to go through everything else in the entire house as soon as possible. I figure I could donate at least half of my possessions and never even miss them, and I’m sure I’d value the extra space more than the stuff that used to occupy it.

Plus, freeing up all of that space is bound to free up psychological space, too, and with my mind free of useless clutter, I’ll get so much more writing done!

But, since my successful clothing purge, I’ve been a bit stuck. Most areas of the house are still in Chaotic Transition Mode. It’s hard to concentrate on big sorting and purging projects when I really should be writing, and hard to concentrate on writing when I know there are big sorting and purging projects to be done.

Even though this particular mess is behind my back when I’m writing, I still know it’s there, and that if I turn around, this is what I’ll see:

Guest_room_10_23_14

What I need is something to get me unstuck, and I think the dream I had early this morning just might do the trick.

“Wake up!”

It was my son Will’s voice, coming from the hall outside my bedroom. It was pitch dark, Tony was still sleeping soundly, and even the cats hadn’t yet begun their get-up-and-feed-me-now assault.

“Wake up!” Will said again. “This is the day you’ve been waiting for!”

As soon as I opened my eyes, I realized I had been dreaming, that no one had called to me from the hallway, that Will was still asleep in his room at the other end of the house. But for about five seconds—long enough for me to start trying to remember what was special about today, and why it was the day I had been waiting for—it felt very real.

It’s not my birthday, or any other holiday. We’re not having company (thank goodness, since my writing room is also the guest room, and the bed is at the very bottom of the pile in the photo above) or going anywhere or expecting a big check in the mail. The weather is just about as dismal as it can possibly be.

But, apparently, this is the day I’ve been waiting for! How can I argue with that?

Before I got out of bed, an idea for a short story had come to me, straight out of nowhere. Then, after breakfast, I moved some junk around and found, hidden underneath, not only the tops of both the kitchen and dining room tables, but also the kitchen counter and part of my desk. (Baby steps.) Tony and I made a definite plan to tackle the basement tomorrow, since it will still be too wet for him to work.

One day soon, I may even tackle my writing room, with the hope of at least getting it back to where it was a year ago:

Writing room

When Jerry wins the lottery

Jerry_nobears

“When Jerry wins the lottery, that’s the first thing to go,” Donna says.

She is referring to the Drawer of Death, the cheap plastic drawer in the kitchen at camp, where we keep all the sharp knives. It regularly falls down, spilling its potentially lethal contents, if you don’t know exactly how to open it.Drawer_of_Death

Donna has been coming to camp ever since we were twelve years old, and there’s not much about camp now that’s different from the way it was then. In fact, there’s still a bottle of shampoo on a shelf in the bathroom that she left behind nearly forty years ago.

We don’t rush into big changes around here. We’re cautious about doing anything that might change the spirit of the place. Or at least that’s my excuse.

Back in those early days, it was one visit a summer, and getting Donna here from Connecticut meant arranging a ride with someone we knew who was making the 325-mile trip, or having her parents put her on a bus for a nine-hour ride.

Now that she lives just a couple of hours away, she gets to come to camp—which has become her “happy place,” just as it is mine—much more often, every two or three weeks in the summertime. This weekend she’ll be here for the ninth time since Memorial Day.

This makes both of us very happy, since, for the past 49 years, we have always loved spending as much time together as we possibly can. It makes Tony and Will very happy, too, because there’s always more fun and better food when Donna is around.

It probably doesn’t make her partner, Jerry, quite as happy.

“You’re always at camp!” he moans, as she waves goodbye to him and heads north.

In all the time they’ve been together—well over 20 years now—Jerry has never been to camp. Not once.

Why? Because no matter how often we tell him that camp is a solid, wooden building with electricity and indoor plumbing, this is how Jerry pictures it:

tent-woods-6031472

Also, he thinks it’s surrounded by bears. In 55 years, I’ve never seen a bear anywhere in the vicinity of North Pond, but that doesn’t prevent Jerry from thinking they’re out there, just out of sight, waiting to attack.

Camp does have a few features that I will confess are a bit primitive.

We spend the warmest four months of the year here, but we have four big windows on the lake side that don’t open. That’s because they’re just old wooden storm windows my parents picked up somewhere when they were building the camp, to use until they could afford to replace them with new (or, more likely, used) double-hung windows.

In other words, they’re temporary. When Jerry wins the lottery, we’ll replace them.

There are several more of these old storm windows that can be opened a few inches and propped up with whatever happens to be handy—a chunk of wood, a can of soup, or an old pickle relish jar full of marbles (which for some reason has been the prop of choice in the guest bedroom for as long as anyone can remember). You have to be careful when you open them, though, because they’re heavy and apt to fall down and smash your fingers.

These windows are also temporary, and will be replaced—when Jerry wins the lottery.

We have a staircase to the loft that is exactly seventeen inches wide, with treads that are only six inches deep. Moving large, heavy objects (like iron cribs and full size mattresses) up and down it over the years has resulted in several bumped chins and pinched fingers, many swear words, and one chipped tooth.

My mother always told people (while they were nursing their pinched fingers and bumped chins) that the stairs were “only temporary,” built as a way to get up to the loft until they could get around to building a permanent staircase. That hasn’t happened yet, but maybe when Jerry wins the lottery.

The kitchen counters at camp are covered with dark green linoleum. Over the years, it has cracked, chipped, and worn away to the point where it really can’t be cleaned effectively because energetic scrubbing just exposes more of the soft black stuff that’s underneath the green layer. We no longer let food come in contact with it, and occasionally we talk about replacing it.

It was only meant to be temporary, after all. We’ll get new countertops when Jerry wins the lottery.

The camp was built—or at least begun—in the summer of 1955, which means that next year our temporary windows and staircase and kitchen-counter linoleum will have been in place for sixty years.

Donna says that when Jerry wins the lottery, he wants to pay for us to replace all these temporary things. Even though I’m always hesitant to change anything about camp, I can go along with most of that idea, since windows that don’t open and scummy black linoleum countertops aren’t exactly the things that lend it its charm. (I may draw the line at replacing the stairs to the loft, though.)

Once Jerry has won the lottery and upgraded some of the more primitive aspects of camp, maybe he’ll even agree to come Jerry_loves_campup for a visit.

But probably only if we build a moat around it to keep out the bears.

My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother

“My mother’s clothes are not my mother…my mother’s things are not my childhood,” says Elizabeth Peavey.

Her terrific one-woman show, which I attended yesterday at St. Lawrence Arts Center in Portland, is about losing a parent, hanging on, letting go, and why it’s all so damned hard.

Through a series of connected monologues that she delivered to the audience while sorting through the contents of her mother’s closet onstage, she gave us a privileged peek at her childhood, her mother, and their relationship.

Elizabeth is nearly the same age as me—just three months younger, to be exact—and I’ve found that I often have an immediate affinity for women who were born within a few months of my birth date.

When I meet someone new, and we realize we’re only weeks or months apart in age (no matter what drastic differences we later discover between our respective childhoods and adolescences), we start off the getting-to-know-you process knowing that we have a set of common experiences. We were the same age—exactly—when Big Events happened that rocked our worlds, like JFK’s assassination, the Watergate scandal, or the airing of the first “Brady Bunch” episode.

We can remember the lyrics to “The Erie Canal” (fourth grade music class), “Seattle” (theme song from the ABC series “Here Come the Brides,” 1968-70), and “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing” (Coke commercial, 1971).

Throughout the show, I found myself making mental comparisons. Clearly, Elizabeth’s mom was more sophisticated than mine—she smoked cigarettes, she wore stylish clothes, and she and Elizabeth’s father entertained often at parties in the family home.

These were all things that were foreign to my experience. My own mom, who was a widow, entertained only family and close friends (and never at fancy dinner parties), wore clothing in a style best described as “suburban drab,” and was death on smoking and drinking.

But look: our moms’ taste in decorating both endured a heavy pine “Colonial period.” (Elizabeth still has the dark-stained pine grain-scoop-or-whatever-the-heck-it-is to prove it. It’s a prop in her show.)

And listen: her description of her dad’s prized rec room—complete with bar, of course—sounds just like the one my best friend’s parents built in their basement in the late sixties. (I bet it had the exact same fluorescent lighting and fake wood paneling, too.)

But even if you aren’t the same age as Elizabeth (and me), if you’ve lost your parents, you’ve probably already figured out that a lot of what you’ve gone through is a fairly universal experience.

Elizabeth says that people come up to her after the show, wanting to share their own stories. They tell her about their own mothers’ particular possessions that they just can’t bear to toss or give away—most often nearly worthless objects, like a tattered apron or hideous artwork.

They send her emails with the subject line, “My Mother’s Dishes Are Not My Mother,” “My Mother’s Keys Are Not My Mother,” and even, she says, “My Mother’s Player Piano Is Not My Mother.”

Before I attended the show, Elizabeth (whom I had met three years ago when I took her two-part memoir class, which is how my writing group got started in the first place) sent me an email about the performance. When she told me about the player piano, I thought about the things I have kept that were my mother’s, and why I haven’t been able to part with them.

I have my mom’s copper Jello molds, even though I seldom use them (I still have PTSD from her tomato aspic and a certain lemon-Jello-and-cabbage creation). I have one of her grocery lists (“Bread, creamed corn, evaporated milk, apples, celery”—obviously it was a corn-chowder-and-Waldorf-salad kind of day). I have this “Don’t Yank the Crank” t-shirt from a failed campaign to save the Bryant Pond Telephone Company in the early 1980s.CAMP 2014 2014-09-15 005

And I’m hanging onto all of it for dear life.

I guess I should be grateful that my mom never owned a player piano, and that her most unwieldy legacy is a 50-year-old Castro Convertible couch.

I remember going with her to the furniture showroom to buy that couch when I was about five years old. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, it was always kept covered with a floral slipcover, and although the original upholstery did eventually wear out, when my mom retired and moved to Maine full-time in 1982, she had it reupholstered and it was as good as new. She sat on it a lot to read, knit, or watch TV, especially during her last few years, when she did more sitting than she ever had before.

After Mom died, I insisted on moving her prized Castro Convertible to camp, where it continues to see heavy use for about four months of the year. Even if I ever did want to part with it, I’d never be able to find anyone to help me move it. It weighs about two tons, and when my brothers, who had moved it for her countless times over the years, brought Mom’s couch to its final resting place at camp, they all declared, “Never again!”

But hey, you know—it’s still in great shape, and even though it’s been ten years since Mom died, every once in a while when I sit on it, I can still imagine I catch a whiff of her Arrid cream deodorant.

How could I ever let it go?

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They don’t make couches like this anymore.

Camp turns 60

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Camp, c. 1957

Sixty years ago today, on August 27, 1954, my mother signed her name as the “Grantee” on a warranty deed in a South Paris attorney’s office, handed over $200 to Earle Palmer, who represented the Mann Company (the “Grantor”), and became the owner of “a certain lot or parcel of land situated in Woodstock, in said County of Oxford and State of Maine.”

I’m not sure why it was my mother, and not my father, or both of them, who signed the deed, and no one else seems to know, either. So I’ve made up my own story about it, some of which I can be pretty sure is true, thanks to the fairly reliable memories of my four older siblings, especially those of my two oldest brothers, who, although they may not agree on all of the details (did the family later buy a used Rangeley boat, or was it a Casco Bay boat? And what, exactly, is a Casco Bay boat, anyway?) generally agree on important things, like where the family went on vacation in 1954 (North Pond), whether it was a rainy two weeks (it was) and which kid most often got stuck riding in the way-back of the station wagon on that trip (Andy).

The story I’ve made up goes like this:

In early August of 1954, my parents and their four kids, for the second year in a row, rent a camp from Ada Balentine, a friend of my grandmother’s, at the far end of North Pond, for their annual two-week vacation. It rains a lot of the time they’re there, but the kids have a blast at the lake anyway, and my father, to keep from getting antsy, uses the rainy days to build and install kitchen cupboards in Ada’s log cabin, which is only a couple of years old. (Ada’s cabin, and the cupboards, are still there.)

Camp lots have just been offered for sale along the undeveloped east shore of North Pond, and, on one of the few days that it doesn’t rain, my parents, who are native Mainers, but living in exile in Connecticut, go over to take a look. They are both longing for a little piece of their home state to call their own, and as soon as they lay eyes on “Lot #10, in Mann Camp Lots Hamlin Grant #13,” with its pine and hemlock trees and wild high-bush blueberries and, especially, the enormous flat-topped boulder perched on the water’s edge, they know they’ve found it.

They take the kids along the shore in Ada’s boat to show them the lot, and surprise them with the news that next summer, they’ll be camping on the lake on their very own lot. Not only that, but my mother and the kids will spend the whole summer there, with my father joining them on weekends and during his vacation.

In my story, my father meets with Earle Palmer the next day, pulls a $20 bill from his wallet and hands it over to secure the deal. The closing is set for August 27th.

The kids, of course, are beside themselves with excitement. Leslie christens the boulder “Sunny Rock,” and it becomes their touchstone. Driving out the Gore Road as they leave Ada’s camp to head home to Connecticut at the end of their vacation, my father stops for a moment where the road comes closest to the lake. They all get out and look across to the unbroken east shore, where, even in the rain and fog, they can easily pick out their lot—“It’s the one with Sunny Rock!” Leslie says.

My father has used up all of his vacation time, so a couple of weeks later, on August 27, 1954, a Friday, my mother drives back to Maine, taking Leslie along for company. They stop in South Paris and my mother signs the necessary papers, the hand holding the pen shaking slightly with excitement.

They’ll stay overnight in Bethel with my grandmother, then drive back to Connecticut the next day. Although she hasn’t planned to drive in the road to the camp lot on this trip—there’s not much there to see, really—my mother can’t resist taking the right turn off of Route 26 when they get to it. They bounce over the muddy mile of new dirt track, twigs scraping against the car windows, and park in the road at the top of the lot. They get out and clamber over the brush left behind by the logging operation that cut all the marketable timber off the lots before they were placed up for sale.

The lot slopes steeply down from the road and is littered with discarded treetops and limbs. Stumps, with roots like bony knees where the water has rushed down from Moody Mountain, which looms over the east shore, and eroded the dirt around them, poke up from the uneven ground. There isn’t a level place to be found big enough to pitch a tent on. My mother has a brief but intense what-have-we-done? moment.

Then Leslie takes her hand. “Come on, Mommy,” she says. “I’ll help you jump across the moat to Sunny Rock so we can look at our lake.”

They stand together on the sun-warmed boulder and look out at North Pond, which, on this cloudless, not-quite-fall day, is an improbable cobalt blue.

Just as it will be on another cloudless, not-quite-fall day, sixty years later.

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The view from Sunny Rock on August 27, 2014.

I’m a little afraid of barber shops

Steve and Peggy weddingAfter seeing this photo from my brother’s wedding (49 years ago today!) in which I was a flower girl, I realized that I was probably one of very few bridal attendants—ever—whose hair for the big day was styled by Frank the Barber, and that reminded me of a post that originally appeared on my old blog (http://harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com/) in March of 2009. Here’s an edited version:

For years now, when I go to get my hair cut, I’ve been saying things like, “Go ahead and cut it short,” and “Don’t worry, you can’t cut it too short for me!” I’ve had lots of haircuts where the hairdresser thought she was done, only to have me ask her to take a little more off.

It wasn’t always this way.

As a kid, I had a lengthy series of severely traumatizing haircuts from a large, well-muscled Italian man with a flat-top—Frank the Barber—in downtown Milford, Connecticut. At first, I was too young to realize that most little girls didn’t get their hair cut at barbershops, where they had to wait their turn sandwiched rather snugly between Pasquale from the pizza place, still in his sauce-covered apron, and a prematurely balding young salesman with a comb-over.

Even after I figured it out, when my mother told me that Frank’s haircuts were much cheaper than those from the salons where my friends went, I didn’t complain too much about it, although it was embarrassing to realize I was having my hair cut at the same place as some of the boys in my class.

Finally, though, after a particularly bad outcome—Frank, struggling to even up my bangs, took a little off one side, then a little off the other, then a little more in the middle, and ended up cutting them so short that Kevin Roman, the meanest boy in the third-grade church choir (I’ve changed his name, just in case he’s no longer mean, and regrets his past), said, “You look just like a baby!” when he saw me—I put my foot down.

After Kevin Roman told me I looked like a baby, I refused to go back to Frank’s Barbershop anymore, and my mother started taking me to the place where she got her hair done, “Mr. Sam, Coiffures” on the Boston Post Road. Her own hairdresser was not Mr. Sam, but the chatty, somewhat abrasive Vi, who had ongoing problems with her teenage children and her love life, but whom my mother liked because she could trust her not to tease her hair too much after she took out the rollers.

I got my hair cut by whoever happened to be available at the salon, occasionally even Mr. Sam himself. The haircuts I got at Mr. Sam, Coiffures were not much different from Frank’s, except that they probably cost three times as much, but at least I didn’t have to worry about running into any boys I knew there. (For all I knew, maybe even Kevin Roman got his hair cut at Frank’s, a possibility too terrible to contemplate.)

In middle school, when I finally decided to rebel, I just stopped getting my hair cut at all. Every girl I knew wore her hair long, straight, and parted in the middle, so that’s how I wore mine for the next few years, too, much to my mom’s dismay. For some reason, she really, really liked short hair, and she campaigned tirelessly for me to get mine cut. By high school graduation, I had caved and gotten it cut short again—more because a few of my friends were wearing their hair short than because it pleased my mother.

I kept my hair short and sensible throughout the late 70s and 80s. I was too busy getting married, working, building a house, having kids, moving to a new house, getting divorced, getting married again, and that sort of thing to want to mess with long hair.

Then I grew it long again. I was in my thirties, and my mother continued to bring up frequently how much cuter my hair had looked when it was short, and to make veiled references to my advancing age, and the inappropriateness of long hair after one is out of one’s teens. In fact, long after she had stopped sighing about my unfinished college degree and given up trying to get me to go to church, she still campaigned for short hair.

After my mom died, I cut my hair short again and realized that, along with all the other things she was right about, short hair probably does look better on me. I’ve kept it short ever since.

Score another one for you, Mom. But I’m still a little afraid of barber shops.